By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — The co-op board of the Upper West Side's storied Dakota apartment building denied accusations of racism in a court document filled Tuesday, according to the New York Times.
The board was responding to a suit, launched last month by current resident and former co-op board president Alphonse Fletcher Jr., which claimed that the body had denied him the right to expand into an adjacent apartment in part because he is African American.
On Tuesday, the board denied the accusations, levied by the noted investment banker, claiming that he had been denied permission to buy the apartment because he simply could not afford it, the Times said.
Specifically, they claimed that the financier's firm, Fletcher Asset Management, had double counted its own assets, making Fletcher's assessment of his own wealth "highly unrealistic," according to the Times.
Fletcher pegged the firm's assets at $429 million, but tax returns showed that his reported income in 2008 was only $674,000, the paper said.
The investment banker, who reportedly pledged $50 million in charitable contributions to improve race relations in 2004, currently pays around $1.5 million on mortgages for three units that he already owns in The Dakota, according to the Times.
The apartment he had hoped to buy before he was denied by the board was selling for $5.7 million, the paper said.
The board also dismissed Fletcher's claim that it had discriminated against other non-white people who had business before them, including the singer Roberta Flack and a man believed to be actor Antonio Banderas, according to the Times.
In his complaint, Fletcher claimed that Flack, who went unnamed in the complaint but is reportedly the only other black resident of the building, had "endured the humiliation of applying multiple times for permission to fix or replace her bathtub" and been forced to use the freight elevator when walking her dogs (in accordance with a rule that white occupants were not allegedly held to), according to the Times.
Fletcher also claimed that a man believed to be Banderas and his wife, actress Melanie Griffith, were denied the right to buy an apartment in The Dakota because the man was Hispanic, the paper said.
The board denied that race or ethnicity played a role in either case, noting that the board has avoided high-profile tenants since the assassination of John Lennon outside its entrance, according to the Times.
Fletcher won a discrimination case against his former employer, Kidder, Peabody & Company, in 1991, the Times said.
In the current suit, Fletcher asked the court to order the board to allow him to buy the apartment and to award him $15 million in damages, according to the paper.
